subject: Beat Making With Dub Turbo Software: How We Got It [print this page] It is always interesting looking back through history to see how certain coincidences worked together to give us what we have today For instance, Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb as popular myth would have it. A British fellow named Swain actually did it and Edison improved on his design.
The same is true about modern day beat making. Now days people are making hip hop beats with complete hip hop studio software like Dub Turbo on their personal computers that rivals professionally produced beats that rap stars rap to.
The DJ
There were two major coincidences that brought us Dub Turbo software as we know it today. The first was in the form of a DJ from Bronx, NY in the 1970's. His name was Clive, but he went by Cool Herc or DJ Cool Herc.
He spun records for block parties and he noticed that the dancers really enjoyed the breaks from the vocals where the beat really took over in the heavy funk music he was playing. He soon devised a way using two record players, syncing them by hand, two play these breaks back to back and thus making them twice as long. These break beats became the backbone of hip hop as did splicing samples together from different songs.
Cool Herc used to call out to his dancers calling the break boys and break girls or b-boys and b-girls for short.. These call outs became the model for the rap that later became a staple of hip hop music.
The Geek
The other coincident happened when a German computer programmer, in the 1980's, developed a way of making a computer play back audio samples in a sequence that was controlled by the computer user.
Even though the computer programer wasn't into hip hop, the hip hop community took notice of his software which made putting samples of music together so much easier than using multiple record-players.
The Results
Now days we have sophisticated software like Dub Turbo that allow users to create beats at 44.1 kHz, 16 bit, stereo sound. That is equal to professionally produced CD's. The results is that this kind of software allows anyone with a computer to make professional quality beats. In fact, you can have a professional quality beat burned to CD with in an hour after downloading the software.
These two man from vastly different backgrounds and who were most likely unaware of each other had a tremendous influence in allowing hip hop beat making to spread around the globe.
